Robert Zubrin asks, “Why are we wasting tens of millions of dollars per year statewide, and close to 20 percent of classroom time, on a testing program, only to find out nothing that we didn’t know before?”

He’s referring to the strong correlation between student performance and family income. I would add, to bolster the argument, that the majority of classroom teachers could accurately predict the performance of their students on those same tests.

Surely somewhere out there is an enterprising doctoral student who could create a stratified, random sample of students from across the state, simply ask teachers to predict student performance on the test, then compare that prediction with the actual results. I believe the correlation would be quite high.

If it can be shown that teachers provide the exact same information as the tests, it would make one ask why we continue to enrich testing companies.

Maureen Wirth, Aurora

This letter was published in the Feb. 13 edition.

Hooray for Robert Zubrin! Finally someone from outside education who sees what is really going on and says something about it. People would be amazed and dismayed to find out how much time and money is really being spent on testing, time and money that could be spent improving student learning experiences.

Gary Montijo, Lakewood

This letter was published in the Feb. 13 edition.

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I think it safe to say that the chief result of NCLB tests used to rate teachers, principals, and schools is a sordid story of one unintended consequence after another. It doesn’t do the kids much good either, what with taking a test in early March and getting the results next September. MAPs testing results are, at least, instantaneous, but there are too often inaccuracies, particularly at the higher levels. They too seem to cost more than they should.

Dano2

I know quite a few teachers. My sister and niece are teachers. Teachers have known for years that “teaching to the test” is a waste of time.

Best,

D

peterpi

Yeah, but it makes conservatives feel smug.

johnrpack

The conservatives (and the liberals and libertarians too) all feel pretty smug … and that was BEFORE cherry-picking the data.

Dano2

BEFORE cherry-picking the data.

Evidence please.

Best,

D

tomfromthenews

Amen, brother (and sisters)!

guesswhodrews

Then why would they do it?

peterpi

Because it’s required of them.

StillUndecided

This little five word sentence really struck me. Is it required in that the administration has mandated that they teach certain material that they know is on the test? Is it required because they have been given an impossible goal and the only way to meet it is to teach to the test? Either way – the issue here is the administration, not the teachers.

goodspkr

I think the bigger question is what is on the test. If they have the right things on the test, the teachers should be teaching that anyway (not the test, but the material). And if they are good teachers teaching important material, I don’t see a problem.

toohip

The “test” is from the “education reformers” who have an agenda to wreck the institution of “public” education by eroding it from within, blaming it all on the teacher unions, teachers, and too much $. Step 2: enter vouchers and private schools.

Dano2

No Child’s Behind Left is what one of my friends called it.

Best,

D

Dano2

I know quite a few teachers. My sister and niece are teachers. Teachers have known for years that “teaching to the test” is a waste of time.

Best,

D

peterpi

I think there’s a deliberate effort to boost suburban schools and blame urban schools.
Urban schools are being reorganized, turned into charters, and in some cases, attempted to be privatized, while suburban schools get routinely praised, rewarded, and flooded with cash, on the basis of these tests.
The old CSAP (which I gather has been replaced with something else) was proposed by suburban legislators.
If these standardized tests ever bite suburban schools in the derriere, watch how fast they’re dumped. But, as long as the tests can be used to pounce on urban schools, and suburbanites can feel smug, nothing will change.

StillUndecided

As I read Maureen Wirth’s letter, a question came to me. What happened that family income now has such an effect on student performance? When I grew up, my family, and the families of most of the people that I went to school with, would be considered destitute by today’s standards. My parents struggled to just keep us fed. We got one new outfit for the first day of school and maybe again at Christmas. I would go with my Dad on nights and weekends to do odd jobs to make money for the family.
My friends and I all did fine in school. We all graduated. Some even went to college. Why is income such a factor now?

GenePH

Our culture now promotes NOT learning by certain groups – and I think income levels enter into that. However, it is pervasive in our culture. Bill Cosby can speak to that, I cannot. Just pointing it out. Now it is cool to speak ignorantly like a hip-hop artist and think you don’t need an education. You just need that break in life where you get on a Ytube clip or on television for 30 seconds. Many kids wear their pants down and have an “I’m owed attitude.” These kids are disadvantaged in school – their parents don’t care about education, like yours and mine did. It’s all up to the school now, as opposed to the parents. Although I do remember my mother quoting my teacher after a conference, “Your kids are fine, its those parents’ kids that don’t come to see me that we are having trouble teaching.”

I will add, the top down education standards where the federal government hands out money to the local districts, does promote a leveling out and not just raising up the lower kids. So the top learners and held back by the (good ?) intentions of the government.

toohip

Thor’s got a solution for you, Gene. . . “pull their pants up!” – will solve everything! Bill Cosby is a comedian and a jerk as an educator. He won’t speak at a university unless they give him an honorary Doctorate. The “king” of “Pull up Your Pants” rants! Cosby is a classic conservative with unclassic humor. ““I’m a Christian. But Muslims are misunderstood. Intentionally misunderstood. We should all be more like them. They make sense, especially with their children. There is no other group like the Black Muslims, who put so much effort into teaching children the right things, they don’t smoke, they don’t drink or overindulge in alcohol, they protect their women, they command respect. And what do these other people do? They complain about them, they criticize them. We’d be a better world if we emulated them. We don’t have to become black Muslims, but we can embrace the things that work.” – See more at: http://madamenoire.com/281822/bill-cosby-and-the-cult-of-why-cant-black-people-be-more-like/#sthash.hlTOaRzt.dpuf” Stick to comedy, Bill

It is directly related to school funding. The higher the income, the higher the property value, the higher the levy for public schools. That’s how we do it for public schools. Of course, it goes without saying that higher incomes can afford private schools.

Best,

D

guesswhodrews

Actually is used to be a bigger factor than it is now. With both state and federal funding not being based on property taxes the disparity between high income and low income schools has narrowed. You should have known that.

But your conundrum seems to call for another solution. You know, it might make sense to have vouchers that are equal for all kids and they can go to the school of their choice that will take them. If only there was an enlightened school board that was looking at something like this.

Dano2

I don’t know what you are babbling about – statewide base funding per pupil is what it is, plus other factors for location. That has nothing to do with HH income

When the state share of K-12 education goes down, where do the schools go for more funding? The local property owners or the funding fairy?

Best,

D

guesswhodrews

65% of school funding comes from the state, not through property taxes which is contrary to your first posting that “The higher the income, the higher the property value, the higher the levy for public schools.” So when I talked about that, you changed the subject to what happens when k-12 state funding goes down? What happens when any of us has our income reduced? We have to economize and figure out how to get more for less.

Dano2

I’ll type slowly:

The difference in state funding comes from _______.

State funding has been declining. School districts have been asking ____________ for money to make up the shortfall.

_______ income areas have more money proportionally to provide to school districts.

See how easy that is? Sure you do! Even you can grasp it!

(this argument should in no way be construed to mean property taxes are the only reason school performance differs)

Best,

D

guesswhodrews

DTJ thinks by typing slowly he ___________________.

But he doesn’t seem to know that funding for schools no longer only comes from _________________________.

And he thinks anything but doing it the way it’s always been done is _____________________________

toohip

I should of known the “voucher” carrot would be dangled. Remember “vouchers for the poor” where a parent could get $2,000 a semester to put their kids in private school, when the average tuition for private school was $20k!

Don’t try to float the privatization of our schools and everything else (including highway 36) here. We know you on the right hate gubmint socialism like public schools, police, fire, and miliatry services.;o) You just “choose” to send your kids to private schools, but don’t ask me to pay for it.

guesswhodrews

Talk to DTJ. He brought up private schools and how the public ones had a lot more money in well to do school districts.

StillUndecided

But that is the point. Growing up, our schools were poor. No frills at all. We ate lunch at tables rolled into the gym. Class sizes were huge compared to the size of my daughter’s classes. Nobody went to private schools. Of the hundreds of kids that I knew growing up, I can name exactly one that dropped out and didn’t finish high school. Ironically, his parents were fairly well off. He quit school to go to work for his dad as a logger and made extremely good money at the time.

toohip

Still, you’re clinging to the past. . the good old days when you “believed” everything was perfectly fine. It wasn’t, you just weren’t aware of it because of limited media and a very powerful controlling authority, in this case in the school system. You may believe you and all your friends who relatively poor were successful, because you passed through school with ease, and the one example of a rich kid who dropped out isn’t a indicator that income was a problem. For sure, “times have changed.” Poor families have a lot more on their plate to worry about then what you and I did as poor families. I bet your dad (and your mom) didn’t have to work 2 or 3 jobs, some at minimum wage to get by. Back then the standard was stay-at-home moms, and fathers were the bread-winners, and they did it with one job. Take your’s and my father’s pay back then at blue collar jobs, and compare it today at the rate of inflation and you will see they were pretty well off back then. a lot of simplicity back then, a lot less distractions. I had classes sizes that exceeded 30 students, and this was the beginning of the baby boomer days.

peterpi

“Why, in my day, we walked ten miles uphill each direction to and from school, through 5-ft high snow drifts, in 120-degree weather …”

StillUndecided

Well, you certainly have me beat – I rode a bus.

StillUndecided

“It wasn’t, you just weren’t aware of it because of limited media…”
I think that this is the key.
Looking back, we were dirt poor. My mom and dad both worked. Dad during the day, mom overnight from 11pm to 7am. Dad worked odd jbs for more money to pay the bills. The difference, as you put so well, is that we just didn’t realize it. Everyone that we lived near were equally poor. We didn’t know any different. Most of all, we didn’t have a media telling us how bad we had it. There wasn’t anyone telling us that we were victims. The poor of today are beaten upside the head day in and day out about how bad off they are. That it is the fault of the evil corporations and the evil rich people. And then they hear about how the government is going to pass another law to give them yet more handouts. And how the evil Repubs want to block those additional payments so that the poor can all starve in the streets.
Yes, I have to agree with you.

Dave52

Why is income such a factor now?

When you were a student, did you have a computer at home with internet access, spend 30 min an evening on Khan Academy, a TE101 graphing calculator for advanced algebra, a smart phone to share homework tips? Thats pretty much the minimum these days. Now the kids getting ahead take vacation trips to the Smithsonian, attend summer camps with top college-student counselors, take field trips to France and Spain.

Dano2

…and the networks they make from sports where their taxicab drivers parents drive them all over help them as well.

Best,

D

StillUndecided

We are talking about proficiency on tests, not getting into Harvard. I know for a fact from our friends that have high school age kids that they don’t do everything that you list and those kids are headed to college.Some to out of state schools, most to the in-state school, not the community colleges or tech schools that you would assume.
Why could the poor kids of 20 or 30 years ago do basic math, reading and writing but so many today cannot? It is not because they haven’t been to Spain.

Lew Schiller

I agree. If parents don’t care – children will fail.
Why is this less of a problem in the Asian community?
Because they get it. Work hard – study hard – you will succeed.

toohip

Still, it has everything to do with education, and if you accept the studies, you will see wealth is directly proportional to quality education, either because of the buying power of the parents, or the worth the parents put in to education. There are many stories of poor kids doing well in school, and I lived in the same situation. But it’s much more of an uphill struggle then the “child that’s got it’s own!”

Dano2

If a kid is hungry, they won’t learn. How many high-income kids go to school hungry?

They erroneously conclude: Why work hard in a failing school when it will make no difference in your life?

Dano2

*eye roll*

Best,

D

guesswhodrews

It’s called learned helplessness. For a brief period we had limits on welfare but the Democrats not letting a crisis go to waste eliminated the work requirement in the 2009 stimulus package.

StillUndecided

I see your point. If they get told enough times that they aren’t learning because their school just wasn’t given enough money, they learn that bigger government handouts are the only way for them to make it through life.

toohip

My retired teacher wife of 25+ years can do the same thing with the kids that came in to her ECE classroom, just by judging the parents, the mannerisms of the kids, and their culture. The “Any Child Can Learn” program of DPS long ago, was the uber-liberal approach to education, and treated all child equal when trying to educate them, But ask any teacher, about how much influence the parent’s respect for education, home environment, and culture play into the equation, they will tell . . outside the classroom, because they know it’s politically incorrect to speak of education in these terms. Mareen Wirth is correct, the teachers know their students, their parents, . . and more important they know their job. Let teachers teach!

StillUndecided

I notice that you never mentioned income level once here. Which is the point that I tried to make earlier. There is something well beyond income causing scores for certain groups to be lower.

toohip

Income level is a factor, but not how you portray it (“when I was poor. . “) Times have changed and the “new poor” have a different set of problems. While we don’t like to associate poor with ability to learn, there is a politically incorrect truth here. Part of it is the reality that the parents, often working 2-3 jobs don’t have time to push their kids, help with homework, participate in school (teacher conferences). It’s just not that direct of a correlation of economics, but there is a correlation of economics and culture.

StillUndecided

I certainly acknowledge your point, but I think that it goes beyond what you state. Expectations have changed. Expectations for what kids should learn – yes, but also expectations of the lifestyle that people live. I am going to go off on another of my “when I was poor…” stories. My parents never had a “new” car, ever. We never went to football or baseball games. We almost never ate out. For a birthday treat we could go to McDonalds. We had one small black and white TV in the house. If cell phones had existed then, there is no way that my parents would have spent money on that. And I said before, both my parents worked and all of us kids did summer and after school jobs. Doesn’t DPS have something like a 60% graduation rate? I doubt that 40% of all the families are so destitute that the parents are working 2-3 jobs and therefore don’t have time for their kids.

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